Programmable anisotropic digital metasurface for independent manipulation of dual-polarized THz waves based on voltage-controlled phase transition of VO2 microwires
Programmable metasurfaces incorporated with tunable materials controlled by external stimuli can provide an unprecedented degree of freedom in dynamical wave manipulation in real-time. Beyond the scope of isotropic reconfigurable metasurfaces that only support unique tunable responses for excitation with a certain single-polarization, here, for the first time a new generation of ultrafast reprogrammable multi-functional anisotropic metasurface is reported to enable interchangeable missions independently for two orthogonal linearly polarized THz wavefront excitations. The reconfigurability of the proposed anisotropic meta-device was guaranteed by elaborately designed meta-particle composed of two perpendicular VO2 microwires whose operational statuses can be arbitrarily and dynamically tuned among two digital states of 0 and 1 independent for dual-polarization channels by mere changing the biasing voltage via two independent computer-programmed multichannel DC network. Capitalizing on such meta-particle design, single/multiple focused THz beam into a pre-determined focal spot and single/multiple focused vortex beams with interchangeable OAM modes satisfactorily generated by encoding a metasurface with different parabola and spiral-parabola-like coding sequences respectively. Besides controlling the near field behaviors, the versatility and flexibility of the proposed anisotropic metasurface also can furnish an inspiring platform to manipulate the far-field scattering patterns in each desired polarization channel. Anisotropic meta-device bringing new degrees of freedom in achieving versatile tunable control of differently polarized electromagnetic waves which will significantly enhance storage density and data capacities and has the potential for complicated wave manipulation such as ultrafast THz communication and dynamic holography.
Metasurfaces, ultrathin and planar electromagnetic devices with sub-wavelength unit cells, have recently attracted enormous attention for their powerful control over electromagnetic waves, from microwave to visible range. With tunability added to the unit cells, the programmable metasurfaces enable us to benefit from multiple unique functionalities controlled by external stimuli. In this review paper, we will discuss the recent progress in the field of programmable metasurfaces and elaborate on different approaches to realize them, with the tunability from global aspects, to local aspects, and…
Metasurfaces, the two-dimensional counterpart of metamaterials, have caught great attention thanks to their powerful control over electromagnetic waves. Recent times have seen the emergence of a variety of metasurfaces exhibiting not only countless functionalities, but also a reconfigurable or even programmable response. Reconfigurability, however, entails the integration of tuning and control circuits within the metasurface structure and, as this new paradigm moves forward, new reliability challenges may arise. This paper examines, for the first time, the reliability problem in programmable m…
Electromagnetic environments are becoming increasingly complex and congested, creating a growing challenge for systems that rely on electromagnetic waves for communication, sensing, or imaging, particularly in reverberating environments. The use of programmable metasurfaces provides a potential means of directing waves to optimize wireless channels on-demand, ensuring reliable operation and protecting sensitive electronic components. Here we introduce a technique that combines a deep learning network with a binary programmable metasurface to shape waves in complex reverberant electromagnetic e…
We present for the first time an experimental demonstration on the energy allocation of commodity Wi-Fi signals in a programmable and inexpensive way. To that end, we design an electronically-programmable phase-binary coding metasurface, working at the 2.4GHz Wi-Fi frequency band, to manipulate dynamically and arbitrarily the spatial distribution of commodity Wi-Fi signals. Meanwhile, an efficient algorithm is developed to find the optimal coding sequence of the programmable metasurface such that the spatial energy of commodity Wi-Fi signals can be instantly controlled in a desirable way. Sele…
Over the last couple of years, the digital coding acoustic metasurfaces have been developed rapidly as a highly active research area for their unique and flexible manipulation of acoustic wavefronts. Nevertheless, all recent attentions in the acoustic community have been mainly concentrated on space-encoded architectures, leaving the room free for benefiting from the unique features of spatiotemporally modulated metasurfaces. By entering the world of time, here, we propose a space-time-coding acoustic digital metasurface with exotic ability to dynamically transfer the energy of the carrier aco…
Programmable metasurfaces have garnered significant attention as they confer unprecedented control over the electromagnetic response of any surface. Such feature has given rise to novel design paradigms such as Software-Defined Metamaterials (SDM) and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) with multiple groundbreaking applications. However, the development of programmable metasurfaces tailored to the particularities of a potentially broad application pool becomes a daunting task because the design space becomes remarkably large. This paper aims to ease the design process by proposing a meth…
We propose to achieve joint detections of frequency and direction of arrival in wideband using single sensor based on an active metasurface with programmable transmission states of pass and stop. By integrating two PIN diodes with the opposite directions into the proposed single-layer and ultrathin meta-atom, the transmission performance with 10 dB difference between the pass and stop states is realized in the bandwidth from 5.9 GHz to 8.8 GHz using field-circuit co-simulations. Accordingly, random receiving patterns are generated by controlling the programmable metasurface composed of the swi…
Tunable metasurfaces are ultra-thin, artificial electromagnetic components that provide engineered and externally adjustable functionalities. The programmable metasurface, the HyperSurFace, concept consists in integrating controllers within the metasurface that interact locally and communicate globally to obtain a given electromagnetic behaviour. Here, we address the design constraints introduced by both functions accommodated by the programmable metasurface, i.e., the desired metasurface operation and the unit cells wireless communication enabling such programmable functionality. The design p…
Beam steering is one of the main challenges in energy-efficient and high-speed infrared light communication. To date, active beam-steering schemes based on a spatial light modulator (SLM) or micro-electrical mechanical system (MEMS) mirror, as well as the passive ones based on diffractive gratings, have been demonstrated for infrared light communication. Here, for the first time to our knowledge, an infrared beam is steered by 35° on one side empowered by a passively field-programmable metasurface. By combining the centralized control of wavelength and polarization, a remote passive metasurfac…
Metamaterials and metasurfaces have given possibilities for manipulating electromagnetic (EM) waves that in the past would have seemed impossible. The majority of metasurface designs are suitable for a particular frequency and angle of incidence. One long-sought objective is the design of programmable metasurfaces to dynamically manipulate a variety of incoming EM frequencies and angles. In order to do this, a large-scale mesh of networked chips are required below the metasurface, which apart from adapting electrical impedance properties, also communicate with each other, thus relaying informa…
The microwave imaging based on inverse scattering strategy holds important promising in the science, engineering, and military applications. Here we present a compressed-sensing (CS) inspired large- aperture computational single-sensor imager using 1-bit programmable coding metasurface for efficient microwave imaging, which is an instance of the coded aperture imaging system. However, unlike a conventional coded aperture imager where elements on random mask are manipulated in the pixel-wised manner, the controllable elements in the proposed scheme are encoded in a column-row-wised manner. As a…
A tunable metasurface absorber is presented in this work using an optically-programmable capacitor as the tuning element. The tuning element does not employ conventional semiconductor technologies to operate but rather a bases its tuning by changing the optomechanical properties of its dielectric, poly disperse red 1 acrylate (PDR1A). Doing so there are no conventional semiconductor devices in the RF signal path. The metasurface operates at a design frequency of 5.5 GHz and it achieves an optically-tuned bandwidth of 150 MHz, from 5.50 GHz to 5.65 GHz.
On-chip mode-division multiplexing (MDM) has been emerging as a promising technology to further enhance the link capacity and bandwidth of data communications with multiple mode channels. Both mode converters and mode exchangers are indispensable fundamental components for flexible mode operations. While several configurations have been developed previously, it is still very challenging to efficiently manipulate arbitrary high-order modes in a versatile way to reduce the R&D and prototyping costs. Here we initiate a breakthrough with a simple yet universal generic mode operator building block …
Molding the flow of light at the nanoscale has been a grand challenge of nanophotonics for decades. It is now widely recognized that metasurfaces represent a chip-scale nanophotonics array technology capable of comprehensively controlling the wavefront of light via appropriately configuring subwavelength antenna elements. Here, we demonstrate a reconfigurable metasurface that is universal, i.e., notionally capable of providing diverse optical functions in the telecommunication wavelength regime, using a compact, lightweight, electronically-controlled array with no moving parts. By electro-opti…
Optical prisms are made of glass and map temporal frequencies into spatial frequencies by decomposing incident white light into its constituent colors and refract them into different directions. Conventional prisms suffer from their volumetric bulky and heavy structure and their material parameters are dictated by the Lorentz reciprocity theorem. Considering various applications of prisms in wave engineering and their growing applications in the invisible spectrum and antenna applications, there is a demand for compact apparatuses that are capable of providing prism functionality in a reconfig…
Modulation of metasurfaces in time gives rise to several exotic space-time scattering phenomena by violating the reciprocity and generation of higher-order frequency harmonics. We introduce a new design paradigm for time-modulated metasurfaces, offering electrically tunable engineering of the generated frequency harmonics and their emerging wavefronts by controlling the phase delay in modulation. It is demonstrated that the light acquires a dispersionless phase shift regardless of incident angle and polarization, upon undergoing frequency conversion in a time-modulated metasurface which is lin…
In the quest to realize analog signal processing using sub-wavelength metasurfaces, in this paper, we demonstrate the first experimental demonstration of programmable time-modulated metasurface processors based on the key properties of spatial Fourier transformation. Exploiting space-time coding strategy enables local, independent, and real-time engineering of not only amplitude but also phase profile of the contributing reflective digital meta-atoms at both central and harmonic frequencies. Several illustrative examples are demonstrated to show that the proposed multifunctional calculus metas…
Modern wireless communication is one of the most important information technologies, but its system architecture has been unchanged for many years. Here, we propose a much simpler architecture for wireless communication systems based on metasurface. We firstly propose a time-domain digital coding metasurface to reach a simple but efficient method to manipulate spectral distributions of harmonics. Under dynamic modulations of phases on surface reflectivity, we could achieve accurate controls to different harmonics in a programmable way to reach many unusual functions like frequency cloaking and…
Programmable metasurfaces for future photonic artificial intelligence
Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院）；Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；LAAS, Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学LAAS实验室）；Université de Rennes（雷恩大学）；Department of Physics, Colorado School of Mines（科罗拉多矿业学院物理系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Boston University（波士顿大学电气与计算机工程系）
We introduce the concept of smart radio environments, currently intensely studied for wireless communication in metasurface-programmable meter-scaled environments (e.g., inside rooms), on the chip scale. Wireless networks-on-chips (WNoCs) are a candidate technology to improve inter-core communication on chips but current proposals are plagued by a dilemma: either the received signal is weak, or it is significantly reverberated such that the on-off-keying modulation speed must be throttled. Here, we overcome this vexing problem by endowing the wireless on-chip environment with in situ programma…
Neuromorphic photonics has recently emerged as a promising hardware accelerator, with significant potential speed and energy advantages over digital electronics, for machine learning algorithms such as neural networks of various types. Integrated photonic networks are particularly powerful in performing analog computing of matrix-vector multiplication (MVM) as they afford unparalleled speed and bandwidth density for data transmission. Incorporating nonvolatile phase-change materials in integrated photonic devices enables indispensable programming and in-memory computing capabilities for on-chi…
Monitoring and controlling the state of polarization of electromagnetic waves is of significant interest for various basic and practical applications such as linear position sensing and medical imaging. Here, we propose the first conformal digital metamaterial absorber to detect the polarization state of THz incident waves. The proposed polarimeter is capable of characterizing four independent polarization states of (TE, TM, $\pm {45^\circ}$ linear, and RCP/LCP) by observing the reflectivity of the structure with respect to the x- and y-direction. Besides, the proposed structure displays a str…
Despite recent advances in active metaoptics, wide dynamic range combined with high-speed reconfigurable solutions is still elusive. Phase-change materials (PCMs) offer a compelling platform for metasurface optical elements, owing to the large index contrast and fast yet stable phase transition properties. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an in situ electrically-driven reprogrammable metasurface by harnessing the unique properties of a phase-change chalcogenide alloy, Ge$_{2}$Sb$_{2}$Te$_{5}$ (GST), in order to realize fast, non-volatile, reversible, multilevel, and pronounced optical modul…
Achieving the very special condition of perfect absorption (PA) in a complex scattering enclosure promises to enable a wealth of applications in secure communication, precision sensing, wireless power transfer, analog signal processing and random lasing. Consequently, a lot of recent research effort was dedicated to proposing wave-front shaping protocols to implement coherent PA in a complex scattering environment. Here, instead of shaping the impinging wave front and tuning the system's attenuation, we propose the conceptually different route of solely tweaking the randomness of the complex s…
Software-defined metasurfaces are electromagnetically ultra-thin, artificial components that can provide engineered and externally controllable functionalities. The control over these functionalities is enabled by the metasurface tunability, which is implemented by embedded electronic circuits that modify locally the surface resistance and reactance. Integrating controllers within the metasurface cells, able to intercommunicate and adaptively reconfigure it, thus imparting a desired electromagnetic operation, opens the path towards the creation of an artificially intelligent (AI) fabric where …
In this paper, a wideband and low-scattering metasurface in terahertz (THz) is introduced. The proposed coding metasurface is composed of four different graphene square patches in one layer, which has a distinct bias voltage. By optimizing the chemical potential of each patch, the reflection phase and amplitude of a designed element can be controlled in a real-time manner. The chemical potential optimizing approach is a promising method to develop metasurfaces, which can tune the reflection phase, magnitude, or polarization dynamically at different frequencies spectrum. Indeed, by adjusting th…
Nonreciprocal radiation refers to electromagnetic wave radiation in which a structure provides different responses under the change of the direction of the incident field. Modern wireless telecommunication systems demand versatile apparatuses which are capable of full-duplex nonreciprocal wave processing and amplification, especially in the reflective state. To realize such a unique, extraordinary and versatile functionality, we propose an architecture in which a chain of series cascaded radiating patches are integrated with nonreciprocal phase shifters, providing an original and efficient app…
We present a hybrid device platform for creating an electrically reconfigurable metasurface formed by the integration of plasmonic nanostructures with phase-change material germanium antimony telluride (GST). By changing the phase of GST from amorphous to crystalline through Joule heating, a large range of responses from the metasurface can be achieved. Furthermore, by using the intermediate phases of GST, the metasurface can interact with the incident light in both over-coupling and under-coupling regimes, leading to an inherently broadband response. Through a detailed investigation of the na…
Space-time modulated metasurfaces have attracted significant attention due to the additional degree of freedom in manipulating the electromagnetic (EM) waves in both space and time domains. However, the existing techniques have limited wave control capabilities, leading to just a few feasible schemes like regulation of only one specific harmonic. Here, we propose to realize independent manipulations of arbitrarily dual harmonics and their wave behaviors using a space-time-coding (STC) digital metasurface. By employing different STC sequences to the reflection phase of the metasurface, independ…
The success of semiconductor electronics is built on the creation of compact, low-power switching elements that offer routing, logic, and memory functions. The availability of nanoscale optical switches could have a similarly transformative impact on the development of dynamic and programmable metasurfaces, optical neural networks, and quantum information processing. Phase change materials are uniquely suited to enable their creation as they offer high-speed electrical switching between amorphous and crystalline states with notably different optical properties. Their high refractive index has …
Modern electronic systems operate in complex electromagnetic environments and must handle noise and unwanted coupling. The capability to isolate or reject unwanted signals for mitigating vulnerabilities is critical in any practical application. In this work, we describe the use of a binary programmable metasurface to (i) control the spatial degrees of freedom for waves propagating inside an electromagnetic cavity and demonstrate the ability to create nulls in the transmission coefficient between selected ports; and (ii) create the conditions for coherent perfect absorption. Both objectives are…
Metasurfaces-Enabled Wave Computing for Future Wireless Systems: Opportunities and Challenges
Institute for Communication Systems, University of Surrey（萨里大学通信系统研究所）；Universidad de Oviedo（奥维耶多大学）；National and Kapodistrian University of Athens（雅典国立卡波迪斯特里亚斯大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；Centre for Wireless Innovation, Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学无线创新中心）
Univ Rennes（雷恩大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；IETR - UMR 6164（电子与通信技术研究所 - 混合研究单位6164）
We present an intelligent programmable computational meta-imager that tailors its sequence of coherent scene illuminations not only to a specific information-extraction task (e.g., object recognition) but also adapts to different types and levels of noise. We systematically study how the learned illumination patterns depend on the noise, and we discover that trends in intensity and overlap of the learned illumination patterns can be understood intuitively. We conduct our analysis based on an analytical coupled-dipole forward model of a microwave dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA); we formulate …
Dynamically Tunable Membrane Metasurfaces for Infrared Spectroscopy
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；Istanbul University（伊斯坦布尔大学）；Argonne National Laboratory（阿贡国家实验室）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）
We show experimentally that the fundamental ingredient of wave-based signal differentiation, namely zeros of the scattering matrix that lie exactly on the real axis, can be imposed at will and in situ by purposefully perturbing an overmoded random scattering system. The resulting unprecedented flexibility overcomes current limitations of wave-based differentiators, both regarding their extreme vulnerability due to fabrication inaccuracies or environmental perturbations as well as their lack of in situ adaptability. Moreover, in addition to current miniaturization efforts, we suggest that integ…
Optimizing Dynamic Metasurface Antenna Configurations for Direction-of-Arrival and Polarization Estimation Using an Experimentally Calibrated Multiport-Network Model
Univ Rennes, CNRS, IETR - UMR 6164（雷恩大学）；Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering, Aalto University（阿尔托大学）
Wavefront shaping (WFS) has emerged as powerful tool to control the propagation of diverse wave phenomena (light, sound, microwaves, ...) in disordered matter for applications including imaging, communication, energy transfer, micromanipulation, and scattering anomalies. Nonetheless, in practice the necessary coherent control of multiple input channels remains a vexing problem. Here, we overcome this difficulty by doping the disordered medium with programmable meta-atoms in order to adapt it to an imposed arbitrary incoming wavefront. Besides lifting the need for carefully shaped incident wave…
Femtosecond all-optical polarization manipulation of harmonic generation in an anisotropic strongly coupled plasmon-epsilon-near-zero metasurface
Key Laboratory for Physical Electronics and Devices of the Ministry of Education and Shaanxi Key Lab of Information Photonic Technique, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University（教育部光电技术与器件重点实验室、陕西省信息光子技术重点实验室，西安交通大学电子科学与工程学院）
